spending

According to the Office for National Statistics’ 2011 report on Family Spending, the average weekly spend on food and non-alcoholic drinks by a one adult, non-retired household was £26.20. The lowest 20% income group spent £21.30 and the highest 20% spent £38.30 - these figures are for 2010 (N.B.There is a line item for 'Restaurants & Hotels' in the OFN's report, with an average figure of £11.20). A few things struck me immediately about these amounts:

They’re complete bollocks.

The top single earners (a group defined as earning over £1,015 per week) only spend £17 more than the poorest on food.

Really? Was this report approved by the Statistics Authority's Board? Did neither the chair, Sir Michael Scholar, nor the two deputies, Lord Rowe-Beddoe and Professor Sir Roger Jowell, think to point out that £38.30 barely gets you a bottle of Laurent-Perrier Brut NV champagne? Has no one at the ONS been to Waitrose on a weekend?

This is pernicious stuff. Presumably it’s these statistics, or similar, that, in part, inform the decision on what amounts to set for the Job Seeker’s Allowance and other benefits. Although for the life of me, I can’t find out how the JSA figure is arrived at.

Let's imagine someone who has 200ml of orange juice of a morning, enjoys fresh coffee, has two Weetabix and milk for breakfast, eats a halfway decent bread, a little fruit, has fresh fish twice a week and a quarter of free range chicken as a Sunday roast. Hardly a picture of excess. Shopping at Asda, that'd be: £2.07 (1.4ml juice), £2.50 (227g coffee beans), £1.92 (cereal and two pints of milk), £1.15 (granary bread), £3.00 (fruit allowance) and £4.76 (1 x trout, 1 x salmon fillet) and £1.37 (chicken quarter). That's £16.77. Out of the ONS's £26.20, that leaves £9.43. Or 85.7p for each of the remaining eleven meals (if no sundries like butter, sugar, salt etc. are bought). The top earners can blow a whopping £1.95 on each meal.

Yet take a quick browse on MoneySavingsExpert.com and you'll find plenty of people spending £20, £15, or £10 per week. Some of the claims made do rather strain credulity. One animal lover says she spends £5 per week on her cat, but only twice that on herself . A man gives a detailed breakdown of his £1,025.94 monthly spend which includes only £25 for groceries or £6.25 per week. But look at this:

"By going at the right time to the supermarket I can get a week’s worth of food for around £5. I try and make my meals at around £1 a day.

That is both heroic and horrendous at the same time. Sadly, that level of weekly spend is the reality for far too many people.

The Minimum Income Standard research project 'aims to set a benchmark for minimum living standards that we should be aiming for as a society, based on what members of the public think is acceptable'. The weekly food allowance for a single person in their latest report is £46.31. I try and budget for around £40 per week, out of a total household allowance of £60. But I'll often spend more, so the MIS figure strikes me as being just about spot on. Mind you, only a few years ago my shopping list was a lot simpler to compile. It looked something like this:

Believe me, the present regimen is a significant improvement. Below are two examples of a weekly menu Chez Skintster - one at around £40, one at around £30.

a week's food and drink for around £40 (May 2012)

Before we go any further I'd like to emphasise something that should be obvious now: that this is not a blog about how to survive on the very lowest budget possible. It's more about eating good food, simply prepared, on a budget. There's a difference.

The difference can be seen, partly, by the presence here of things like scallops, smoked salmon, pancetta, steak and blueberries. But, while the cost of the scallops and pancetta (used in two dishes) came to £4.60, the smoked salmon was from a 90p/120g pack of trimmings from Asda, the blueberries were half price at the local Tesco Express and the 250g butler's steak (from the wonderful East London Steak Co.) cost £2.50. Plus which, these few 'luxuries' were counterbalanced elsewhere by meals using split peas, rice, eggs and cheaper cuts of meat. And, of course, everything I ate (with the exception of a handful of almond thins) was home-made - including breakfast cereal, bread, stock, desserts and cakes.

For the cost of each individual dish I have counted every ingredient, save for seasoning, herbs and spices (and I've made an overall allowance for these at the end). Anyway, here's the menu:

And that was everything I both ate and drank (except for a few mugs of tea on the two days I was at the Maudsley). No soft drinks or snacks excepting what is recorded above. And the total for that little lot is...£41.88.

a week's food and drink for around £30 (June 2012)

I should point out that the total here of £32.59 did include £3.96 for coffee. I rather shot myself in the foot there I guess, but the normal 'cheap' beans which are my mainstay were not available - had they been I'd have saved around £2. I also used a 'premium' bread flour this week, rather than the 60p/1.5kg supermarket one I normally use. As before, for the cost of each individual dish I have counted every ingredient, with an overall allowance for seasoning etc. in the 'store cupboard' line item. The link for the torta de naranja recipe will take you to the Peckham Rye Eats blog - it was Lisa who introduced me to this lovely cake.

You'll notice that the fiscal brakes are definitely on here - for example there's no fresh fish for dinner, no steak or other costly meat and I had pea + ham soup twice (although in the one instance enlivened with some fried chorizo). The (halal) chicken I ate was £2.99 for the whole bird - no corn-feeding or free-ranging this week. I only allowed myself one bowl of granola for breakfast - opting for porridge or peanut butter and toast the rest of the time (and on the Tuesday I only had orange juice). And when the juice ran out that day, I didn't buy another carton.

This week's menu would suggest that if you want to enjoy a varied diet, if you hope to eat well and pleasurably, if you want the food on your plate to gladden your heart as well as fill your belly, £30 is pretty much the bottom line for a weekly spend in this country - or certainly in London.

Consider this: everything I ate this week (apart from a handful of almond thins) was home-made - that includes breakfast cereal, bread, stock and cake. Only the coffee, a chorizo sausage, a few olives and a tub of cream came from a delicatessen; everything else was either from Asda or the shops on Rye Lane. Apart from coffee and tea I only drank tap water - no bottles of water, cans of soda or juice (apart from the morning orange juice). I'm not sure how - without a garden or an allotment, without forming a co-op for bulk purchasing, without living in a large household to benefit from economies of scale, without foraging or skip scavenging - how I could have bought more efficiently the ingredients for what is (I think) a modest yet still enjoyable weekly menu.